


Nobody Likes Magic (Least of All Batman)

by Bekkoni



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Justice League, Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons)
Genre: Awkward Sexual Situations, Gen, Genderbending, Genswap, M/M, Male Friendship, Off-World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-14
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2017-12-29 10:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bekkoni/pseuds/Bekkoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The JL is hunting an intergalactic pirate (and trying to hold together a cosmic peace conference) when Flash accidentally uses alien magic on Batman. Nothing good can come of this. Genswapping silliness, fem!Batman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nobody Likes Magic

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted on FF.net, but I adore it, so it's coming here. This was slightly inspired by the Pixar movie Brave, because apparently my job in life is to ruin children's movies.

Tensions were running high. They’d been on the mission for two days already, and they were dirty, sweaty, and exhausted. Clark had had to stop Bruce from murdering Wally twice already.

And they weren’t even fighting anyone.

The JLA had been asked to take the Javelin and warp-leap thirty light-years to the Talan Hierarchy, an alien civilization that had invited Earth to send ambassadors to their yearly Meeting of Worlds. The United Nations, of course, had called on the Justice League to set up relations with the Talanians. Their secondary purpose was to catch an interstellar pirate that the Green Lanterns had been hunting for months, and who’d been spotted hiding out in the hubbub of the Meeting of Worlds celebrations.

Needless to say, diplomacy was wearing. The Talanians were one of those species that loved endless ceremonies with all the pomp and circumstance. They still had a week of feasts, dances, and on the middle day a ritual fight where one warrior from each race in attendance fought magically-enlivened armor and sculptures (because the Talanians just _had_ to be a magic-using race).

They were all tired and cranky—even Diana had started snapping at people. But Bruce was definitely in the worst of his moods, mostly because he had to be the one to play warrior in the ritual fight, as there was a ban on powers. And when Bruce was in a bad mood, Wally should not have been anywhere near him.

“I’m going to kill you.” Bruce hissed, Talanian purple-sprout juice splashed all across his shirt.

They were at another feast, this time one to celebrate “The Day of Less Talking” (a Talanian celebration of a war in which neither party wanted to negotiate a treaty) and thus the room was nearly silent. But Wally, seated across from Bruce, had tried to reach one of the roasted six-legged birds on a nearby platter and tipped his cup over right onto Bruce.

“Sorry, Bats.” Wally held up his meal apologetically. “It was the last one.”

Bruce leaned across the table, very, very deliberately, and grabbed Wally by the collar. “I am going to _murder_ you.”

“Come on, now,” Clark reached over and pulled Bruce back. “At least it’s not your costume. T-shirts can be replaced easy.”

Bruce grumbled and tried to wipe off the sprout juice. They’d decided to forgo the costumes—they were across the galaxy after all, and with the Talanians’ weird customs it seemed the better bet.

“Ease up,” Wally laughed. “We get eight days off with decent food and hot alien chicks.”

“I should be working,” Bruce snapped. “And so should you.”

Wally slumped in his chair. “God. Fine. Spoilsport.”

“Guys,” said Clark and Diana, in unison. Bruce and Wally glared at each other and went back to their plates.

****#*****

That night, Wally left his room and took a walk through the winding Talanian gardens, cursing Batman all the way. They _had_ to go on this mission—couldn’t he be glad that they weren’t getting punched for once? Or maybe try to lighten up and laugh stuff off once in awhile? Bruce Wayne was kind of a cool dude, if you got over the foppishness—maybe if Bats took a breather he could be an actual person.

Wally kicked a rock on the ground and it shot through an orange plant. Someone on the other side shrieked.

Crap! He darted around the weird-colored roses and found a woman sitting on the ground, rubbing her knee. She was Talanian, with the ruddy red skin and the green crosshatching down her arms.

“Sorry!” He grabbed her and set her back on her feet. “I kicked that rock—didn’t mean to hit you with it.”

She smiled. Wally couldn’t tell how old she was, but she had the intricate medallions of a high-level Talanian sorceress. “Upset, I see?”

“Naw.” Was it wrong that he found Talanian girls kinda hot? “It’s just that—not that this whole ‘Meeting of Worlds’ isn’t great or anything—but one of my teammates is being a jerk since we have to be here and I wish he’d just see it from my point of view for once.”

“You want him to…” she hesitated, the comlinks’ Talanian translator program had some glitches. “Change the way he sees things?”

“Yeah!” They ambled along the pathway, under the leftover banners from yesterday’s festivities. “I just think we’d both be better off, you know?”

“Yes.” She clasped her hands; it was some sort of Talanian-magic thing but Wally had phased out when J’onn explained all the intricate little rituals. “Many people wish others would change—there are some people who just won’t see from a new perspective.”

“That’s _exactly_ what he needs—a fresh perspective.” Wally looked at her, and was suddenly hit with an idea. “Hey, you’re a sorceress, right? Do you have a spell or a potion or something that will make him not be such a stubborn bastard? Not mind control of course, just…ah…make him have a more open mind?”

“I have something for fresh perspectives. Quite popular, on Talan, for those who don’t have the right one to start with.” The sorceress pulled a vial from her robe. “Here. Free, for a guest.”

“Thanks!” Wally took the tiny glass container. The liquid inside was light amber. It looked a lot like apple juice, actually. “So I just slip this in his drink?”

She nodded, and turned down another path. “I have to go prepare for the Lights Festival tomorrow—do you have all you need?”

Wally turned the vial around in his hand. “Yes, yes I think I do.” 

****#****

At the feast the next night, the Talanians insisted on seating everyone. Bruce was at the end of their table, in a bronze seat instead of the other’s green ones. He looked around and saw that all of the other races’ “warriors” were seated the same way. Talanian waiters in long gold robes filtered through the dark wood dining hall carrying platters.

As he watched them set out food, he started seeing that there was some sort of social order going on. Clark (the “leader”) got a roasted bird, while Diana (the “ambassador”) got a plate of vegetables and something that looked not unlike couscous. Wally, Shayera, J’onn, and John (the “support”) were served a cut of sauced meat.

One of the waiters glided up to him, and set down a plate. Diana looked over and almost jumped backward. His plate was full of grey, multi-pronged tentacles swimming in a lighter, sticky grey sauce.

“Comparatively, it’s very high in nutritional value.” Diana gave the plate a scan with her tricorder, and wrinkled her nose. “Fighting food.”

Bruce sighed, and turned away from her and back to his plate, just in time to see Wally pull back. “What were you doing?”

Wally jumped. “I thought I saw a bug in your glass. Geez, Bats. Calm down.”

Bruce rolled his eyes (and checked his glass—no bugs, of course) before picking up his forks. As one of their endless customs, the Talanians got upset if you didn’t eat their food. “Well, here it goes.”

He stabbed at one of the tentacles, and it _squirmed_ away from him. God, ever evolutionary instinct he had was telling him _Do not eat creepy-alive alien foods_. He finally got one speared and stuck it in his mouth. It tasted rancid—sour and slimy, like two-week-old raw pork. It _slithered_ when he swallowed.

Apparently whatever face he was making was hilarious—Clark was chuckling into his hand. He grabbed his glass and downed the whole eight ounces of disgusting sprout juice in two gulps. It felt like the thing was still wiggling in his stomach. “That’s awful. It tastes like rotten meat.”

He still had to eat a third of the plate to meet the minimum of Talanian politeness. One of the servers was passing by—he snagged her by the sleeve and told her in no uncertain terms to bring him a whole pitcher of sprout juice.

****#****

Dinner finally ended an hour later. Bruce kept tasting slime in his mouth, no matter how many glasses of bitter juice he drank, but at least he got to hand his still-wiggly plate to a server.

All the hundreds of attendants began moving from the massive dining hall into an equally massive and ornate room for dancing and music from all the worlds in attendance. Bruce followed John and Shayera (they were back together, and obviously looking forward to dancing from the way they couldn’t keep their hands from touching) towards the ballroom.

Just before he passed through the doorway a wave of dizziness hit him like a two-ton truck. He grabbed the doorframe before he stumbled. His knees suddenly felt about as sturdy as grape Jell-O.

“Are you all right?” Clark came up behind him and touched his shoulder. “You’re shaking.”

“I don’t feel well all of a sudden.” He was cold, even though there were braziers burning all around the room, and his skull felt like it was getting smaller, pressing in on his brain.

Clark pressed a hand to Bruce’s forehead. “You’re a little feverish. Maybe it’s food poisoning?”

“Damn tentacles tasted spoiled.” His stomach started twisting itself into knots. His hand went to his side and his knees buckled. “Ooh.”

“Yeah, probably food poisoning. That stuff looked disgusting.” Clark put an arm around his shoulders. “Come on and lie down. I doubt anyone will miss one human when there’s hundreds of different species packed into a dance hall.”

Bruce nodded, if only because the lightheadedness was starting to make him feel like the room was changing shape around them. Clark walked him to one of the Talanians’ spot transporters and the operator beamed them up to the suite-style hall where they were roomed.

Thank god that the rooms were furnished to human standards. Clark kept a hand on him until they were inside the room he’d been given, and then Bruce just stripped off his shirt and pants and fell into the bed.

“Are you going to be okay?” Clark asked.

“Yeah.” He felt marginally better now that he wasn’t standing. “Food poisoning usually only lasts twenty-four hours.”

Clark turned out the light and left to join the others.

****#****

“Where’s Bruce?” Diana asked the next morning, when they were all sitting around the little table in the room that connected all their bedrooms, waiting to start another day of long, long ceremonies. “Is he still sick?”

“Haven’t seen him,” Shayera said, biting into one of the small, green Talanian fruits that she’d gotten addicted to.

“I don’t know.” Clark stood up from the table. “Maybe he just didn’t wake up. I’ll go check on him.”

He walked up to Bruce’s door and knocked. No answer, but it wasn’t locked so he walked in and turned on the light. The form in the bed was completely covered by the blankets, and didn’t move. Clark reached out to pull them back. “Bruce? Wake up.”

The person in the bed was certainly not Bruce.

In fact, she was for one a woman, and for another naked except for white boxers.


	2. The Principle of Redistribution of Mass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because Wally is an idiot.

The woman had soft, dark hair cut off above her shoulders and when the cool air hit her she stretched out along the mattress so that Clark saw her whole front. She was quite beautiful, but he smacked a hand over his eyes and turned away from the bed, a red-hot blush running through his cheeks.

Where the _hell_ was Bruce? He could be….incorrigible…at times, but surely he hadn’t picked up some alien harlot with Diana staying only two rooms over.

Clark turned towards the closed bathroom, and hollered, “Bruce!”

The woman on the bed opened her eyes, apparently not caring that she was mostly nude, and mumbled into the sheets, “God, Clark, you don’t have to yell. I’m getting up.”

Clark stared. “Um…you…”

The woman sat up on the edge of the bed, her fine, dainty feet dangling off. She gave him a look like he was acting crazy. “What’s wrong with you? I feel fine today, I swear. I guess alien cuisine has the benefit of not being lethal.”

“Um.” Clark swallowed, to try and get some moisture back in his mouth. It didn’t work. “I. Um.”

The woman stood up and stretched. “Honestly. Do I still look bad or something?”

Clark blinked, and opened his fingers so he could get _just_ enough of a view to see her face. There was no way. Was there? She acted like she knew him. She had dark hair and blue eyes, just like Bruce. And they were on a world with magic. It was just…too absurd to even consider. “Bruce? Ah…look down.”

“What?” she did, and her eyes went huge at the sudden extra mass. She (he?) grabbed her hair and felt the extra length, and looked at Clark and realized that there was suddenly a foot of height difference. “Oh. My. God. _Oh my god I will kill him_.”

“Who?” Clark was just trying to wrap his head around the fact that Bruce was now somehow a girl. A pretty girl. He almost smacked himself in the head to get rid of that thought.

“Wally.” Bruce’s look went from confused and startled to dark as a storm cloud. “I swear to god, he added something to my drink. And we’re on a magic-using world—I _hate_ magic!—he probably got some idea in his head and decided it would be fucking hilarious.”

Before Clark could stop him, he ran out to the main room.

****#****

It must have been a dream. It was the only explanation Wally could come up with for why one of his fantasies was actually coming true. A half-naked, smoking hot girl was running straight at him, calling his name.

Only, she sounded kind of angry. And she jumped on him, knocking him off his chair, and yelled, “I am going to kill you! Kill you!”

“Now, keep your head.” Clark walked out from Bruce’s room and pulled the woman off of Wally. “If you kill him you won’t be able to find out how to fix this.”

Diana stood up from her chair. “What on earth is going on? Who _are_ you?”

“I’m Bruce!” shouted the woman. Everyone froze.

“It’s true,” Clark said, with his hand still on the woman’s shoulder. “There seems to be some sort of spell or something at work here. And it switched him, well, to a _her_. Wally, did you have anything to do with this?”

“Um.” Wally bit his lip. “There was this Talanian sorceress, you see. And I was kind of angry at him, so I asked her if she had anything that would give someone an open mind. That’s all! A fresh perspective!”

Bruce growled, then stopped herself and took a deep breath. “Fine. What was her name? She can straighten this out.”

“Uh,” Wally said.

The look on Bruce’s face went darker and darker. She kind of looked like a scarier version of Diana. The next words came out point by bloody point. “Do you at least remember what she looked like?”

“Red skin. Kinda long hair. And those green lines on her arm.”

Bruce lost it. “That’s what _all_ Talanians look like! Goddamit, Wally, I’m going to make it so you can never procreate!” She lunged at him again, and Shayera made a crack about “a dick for a dick.” Bruce added her to the mental hit list, right before Diana and Clark both dragged her off of Wally.

 “I’m sure there’s a solution to this.” Diana stepped in, always the peacemaker. “This woman isn’t the only Talanian magic user. Surely one of the other ones can help us. Bruce will just have to say he’s a latecomer to our group. The question is, what to do about the tournament?”

“I’ve still got to fight in it.” Bruce sat back on the sofa, still glaring at Wally but at least not actively attempting murder. “None of you are eligible and the Talanians would take it as a supreme offense if we didn’t compete. Not to mention that the tournament is the best chance to mingle with all the other races and find out where G’lorth is holed up.”

GL groaned at the mention of the arms pirate. “That has to be our number one priority. He made off with a shipment of micro-particle accelerators. The damage those things can do in the wrong hands…we’ve got to get him before he leave Talan.”

“Agreed.” Bruce sighed, seeming to calm down a bit more. Clark wondered if Bruce with less testosterone was actually an improvement. Then she looked down at herself. “Um, I could use some clothes, though. Like now.”

Shayera and Diana looked at each other, small smiles creeping across their faces. They pulled Bruce up from the couch. “Come with us. We’ll get you something.”

Bruce shot Clark a pleading, horrified glance before the two girls dragged her down the hall.

****#****

“I am not coming out.” Bruce had locked herself in Diana’s room.

“Yes you are.” Shayer glared at the closed door. “What are you going to do, stay in there? Then you won’t catch the pirate, won’t compete in the tournament, and stay female forever.”

“You’re psychotic.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Clark said. “I highly doubt that women’s clothing is worth locking yourself in a tiny dormitory room for. Get out here.”

“Fine.” The door unlocked and Bruce stepped out, walking like she was utterly uncomfortable. She was wearing a tank top (that showed off just how large her chest was) and what could only be described as a tight little miniskirt. She saw Wally (who was gaping, of course) and crossed her arms over her front.

Clark turned to Shayera and Diana. “You two didn’t have any other outfits?”

Diana smirked. Clark wondered if she was enjoying this. “He’s taller than Shayera but shorter than me, so neither of our pants would fit. And we liked this skirt best on him.”

Bruce crossed her arms tighter. She looked slightly traumatized. “They made me try on all of them, Clark. _All of them_.”

Clark patted her on the shoulder. “Think you’re adjusted enough to do that tournament tomorrow? I mean, I know we don’t have very much of a choice…”

“I don’t feel awkward.” Bruce smoothed out the skirt self-consciously. “Maybe that’s one of the one benefits of magic. It feels…well, not natural, but smooth I guess.” She looked down along her bare arms. “I don’t have any scars, either. There should be a three-inch knife scar right there. Its bizarre.”

“Honestly, I was kind of noticing the haircut and the shift in body mass more.” Clark said. But Bruce was right; she didn’t even have the slash across her right hand that had been the result of a childhood fall out of an oak tree. “That’s weird. You’d have thought it would just be a gender-swap spell. Why would it erase scars, too?”

Everyone unconsciously turned to Wally. He shrugged. “How the hell would I know? Seriously, guys, the conversation I had with her was two minutes long.”  

Bruce gave him a long, long glare, then turned away. “I’m going to go try and explain to the Talanians why we’ve mysteriously lost a member of our team and gained a suspiciously similar-looking female.”

Before she left she swung around as suddenly as lightning and grabbed Wally by the arm. “And _you_ will try and find out how to fix this.”


	3. Battle Armor, Girl Style

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Bruce discovers that fighting in a metal bra is not what one might call "fun."

“How’d it go with the Talanians?” Clark asked, when Bruce slid into the seat next to him at their breakfast.

“I told them I was my sister and that my ‘brother’ had to go back to earth so I was taking his place in the tournament. And they accepted it, so that was the good part.” Bruce sighed and tucked her hair behind her ear. Actually, the closer Clark looked, the more he realized that there weren’t a heck of a lot of facial differences between girl-Bruce and boy-Bruce. Longer hair, slightly fuller lips and eyelashes, but that was about it. Not, of course, that he would ever mention it. Or how very much she looked like Lois. “The bad part is that the armor for females looks like this.”

She held up a long, curved sword; a very small skirt made of plates of overlapping gold and silver; and what was essentially a golden bra with short sleeves attached. “I’m going to look like a nerd’s fantasy stripper.”

Shayera choked on her purple beet wine. That was one nice thing about the Talanians: they provided enough wine for everyone to be constantly tipsy. Bruce ignored the fried vegetables on her plate and gulped down a full goblet. Clark gave her a look and she glared back.

“What? The least I can do is get drunk. After all, I have to fight mystically-enlivened statues today. And beat at least 455 of 500 different species’ gladiators to get us into the Talanian Court tonight, where we can get more information on G’lorth and the stolen weapons.” She down the last swallow and put her glass back on the table, though she did resist refilling it.

“Attention worlds!” A Talanian prince’s image was projected up on the dining hall ceiling. “The main event, the Warriors’ Conquest, will be commencing in one universal hour. Please outfit your champions and make your way to the Grand Hall.”

Bruce started grumbling and went into the humanoid bathroom at the side of the hall (though she very nearly went in the men’s before remembering herself) and reemerged wearing the metal swimsuit. She looked utterly depressed, and kept tugged at the skirt, trying to add a few more inches at the hem. The sword looked hilariously outsized on her tiny shoulders.

“I hate this. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.” When she got angry her voice got squeaky. She stomped one adorably small foot and lined up next to the other warriors. A blue light flashed and then they were gone, teleported away to the arena.

The rest of the Leaguers were led to an amphitheater, where the battle was magically projected up on a whitewashed wall.

The first twenty minutes were pretty bizarre, as a variety of aliens with an even bigger variety of body parts threw themselves at each other in an attempt to knock each other out quickly. The false soldiers the Talanians were going to conjure up hadn’t even arrived yet.

Bruce, wisely hung back, flitting between the huge boulders and trees of the arena. The landscape was like a cross between the moon and a rainforest, with towering canopies scattered between rock formations that plunged skyward. It reminded Clark of War World, an experience that he never hoped to repeat, but at least this was ritual as opposed to actual killing.

Blue sparks flashed through the amphitheater as more and more warriors got hits on them. The blob-of-pink-jelly species and the weird-many-legged species got knocked out quickly, but Bruce was still in.

Flashes of orange burst across the battlefield. Enchanted warriors—phantoms with mass. There was one decked out like a living cyclone, a woman made of fire, and hundreds of other warriors in armor, and all shapes and sizes. Clark suspected that this was how the Talanians got their kicks, seeing as how they didn’t put up a champion of their own, host’s courtesy and all that.

For a race with its roots in war and combat, the Talanians did get awfully competitive over their magickery. All the sorcerers of any renown at all had a phantom in the Conquest. Supposedly there was a sizeable purse for whichever one took out the most champions.

On the screen, Bruce backflipped over a phantom in white, to take off another’s head. That teensy outfit showed off all of her muscles, toned and lean. She hit the ground and bent low to cut out another’s knees. All one smooth movement, as graceful as a ballet dancer.

The field narrowed to two hundred, then half that, then half again. It was three hours in, and Bruce was looking visibly tired. Her skin glistened and her hair stuck to her face. A couple of champions fell right over from the heat and the exhaustion.

Bruce paused atop an outcropping, resting her sword at her side. The sun in the arena took up half the sky—the amount of heat must have been incredible. Down to thirty warriors, now. Bruce had to outlast another twenty-five.

One of the other warriors, seeing his chance, leapt at her from behind. Clark gasped in the audience, even though he had no way to yell a warning. Bruce spun around at the last possible second. But it was too late—the warrior knocked her off the outcropping and she tumbled to the ground, landing awkwardly on her left side.

The screen switched to another warrior (a two-headed woman) fighting a group of three black phantoms. Clark could’ve killed whoever was making those cuts.

Finally, the screen flashed back to her. But Bruce was still on the ground. It looked like she was favoring her left leg. That wasn’t good. The other warrior (a brute with leather-like spotted skin and red teeth) charged at her.

Above the screen there was a countdown showing the number of warriors left. It hit twenty, and then seventeen, and then sixteen, and wasn’t going nearly fast enough.

Bruce spun, her skirt flashing in the light of multiple suns. The sword came up and she tripped him with it. He stumbled but kept his footing, and lashed out at her with a vicious left hook. Bruce managed to dodge it, but it knocked her off balance and she fell flat on her back.

Diana gasped, and Wally stiffened in his seat.

The warrior raised his sword. The battle was safe—the weapons wouldn’t kill anyone—but it was still terrifying to see the wickedly sharp blade hovering just feet over Bruce’s heart. She was trapped between a jut of red rock and the alien’s foot. Nowhere to turn. She’d dropped her sword, and it was lying next to her the wrong way, the grip too far away for her to grab.

The warrior roared, and plunged the blade down.

Bruce moved like a flash of lightning, grabbing her sword by the point and slamming the iron grip against the alien’s knees. He howled and dropped his own weapon. Bruce leapt to her feet—hands bleeding from where she’d held the blade—and swiped her sword across his chest.

He vanished in a burst of orange light.

Clark let out a breath and slumped against the back of his chair. Was Bruce in the last five now? He hadn’t kept track.

“Look!” Diana’s nails bit into his arm. She was pointing at the counter. It read a single one. Barely a second later, the Talanians started cheering. In the arena, Bruce wiped the blood off on her leggings, then turned about as she tried to find another warrior and realized there were none.

“Woo hoo!” Wally jumped up from his seat, pumping his fist in the air. “That was awesome! Bats won! _Did you see that?_ ”

Another burst of light on the playing field, and Bruce appeared next to their table. She managed to stay on her feet for a moment before her ankle gave out. Clark leapt up and grabbed her arm.

“I sprained my ankle.” She was grinding her teeth together, and holding her hands out in front of her so she wouldn’t get blood anywhere.

“Sit down.” Clark let her have his seat and checked her hands. They were cut cleanly, but deep enough that she kicked him when he touched the edge of one. Both her palms were cut deep enough to probably need stitches. “Those are bad.”

“Eh.” Bruce shrugged. Her heart was beating fast enough for Clark to pick up on it without trying. There was almost a smile on her face. And then he got it: Bruce very rarely got the chance to truly go all out. Clark could understand metahuman limitations, but sometimes he forgot that Bruce was capable of killing a man with a single blow. This had to be one heck of an adrenaline rush. “They’ll heal. The Talanians have dermal regenerators, you know.”

Clark sighed and gave her a knowing look. “Were you showing off there? No way that guy really got the upper hand on you that easily.”

The smile widened into a grin. “Maybe a little. Being a girl increases one’s flexibility, apparently.” She paused, and admitted, “All right. That was kind of fun. Fighting is better when you can go all out and nobody gets hurt.”

A Talanian embassy approached the table, made up of a high-raking delegate and six female—well, Clark kind of wondered if they were concubines but to be polite he decided to assume they were attendants. Bruce was swept away (probably to be cleaned up before the festivities) and the rest of them were shown into the high court room.

The doors swung closed behind them. Even with only five races “winning” the tournament, there were still hundreds of people milling about. And they had just one space pirate to find. Between the smoke and the free-flowing mead it was more of a bar than anything else.  And alien bars tended not to be hospitable to people who were dampening the festivities.

Clark grabbed a goblet of mead and handed another off to Diana. They started crossing through the crowd, looking for an alien pirate. Blue skin, green hair, and in possession of a weapon big enough to destroy a planet. Sure. That’d be easy.

Wally was actually drinking his booze, which wasn’t exactly the point, but Clark supposed one of them at least had to be drunk. Might as well be the guy who was hyperactive enough to metabolize it in thirty minutes.

The doors swung open again, trumpets blaring. Clark strained over the crowd, trying to see what the heck was going on. Hawkgirl was ahead of him, and she’s stopped short, staring at whoever was coming in.

“Holy shit,” she said, when Clark got up next to her, “get a load of Bruce.”

The Talanians had swept her away to patch her up and do whatever ceremonies were involved with winning the grandest championship on this side of the blood-lovin’ galaxy. Now she stood at the entrance of the hall, in a red dress that was slit dangerously high along the side, with golden strappy high heels and a golden circlet around her forehead.  Her hands were healed, evidentially, but there was still a bandage wrapped around her ankle. The shoes still showed just how long her legs were. Clark looked back down into his goblet so he didn’t have to feel his mouth go dry.

Bruce plunked herself next to Clark, leaned over on her elbow, and asked, “Why is it that nobody wants to give me real fucking clothes around here? I feel like a character in a bad medieval porn flick.”

“Oh, you can pull it off, dear,” Shayera said. Both she and Diana burst into laughter. The Talanians unlimited supply of wine had certainly strengthened their friendship. Bruce tried to hide the slit, and didn’t quite succeed.

A tall alien man, blue-skinned but otherwise quite hunky as aliens go, walked up to their table and fixed his eyes on Bruce. “May I offer the champion a dance?”

“I’m busy,” Bruce said.

“She’s shy,” Diana took away Bruce’s wineglass. “She’d _love_ to.”

“Fantastic.” The man smiled, pulled Bruce to her feet despite her protests, and nearly dragged her over to the dancers. “May I just say?—you look stunning.” 


	4. Zorkian Mating Rituals

After two rounds with the muscular blue man, Bruce got passed off to a three-armed alien (man? Woman? Clark wasn’t sure such terms even applied to it), then a multi-tentacled grey thing, and a pair of green aliens who appeared to be trying to talk her into an intergalactic threesome. Every time she tried to pull away to go back to the Justice League’s table, another admiring alien diplomat swept her back onto the floor. Diana was getting way too much enjoyment out of her boyfriend’s predicament, and Bruce kept shooting her Bat-Looks of Death.

Finally, Diana took pity, got up from the table, and pulled Bruce back over.

 “You,” Bruce said, once she’d gotten her seat next to Clark and had a chance to down some wine, “Are evil. Evil.”

“But think of the insight you now have into female criminals. Priceless.” Diana grinned and leaned over to kiss her.

“Whoa…” Wally’s mouth dropped so far that they could all see the half-chewed bite of Talanian appetizers inside. “Bats is a girl and you just kissed him.”

“Wally, I grew up on an island completely comprised of women trained in the arts of war. Did you honestly think that we were all celibate nuns?” Diana gave him a look like that notion was completely and utterly ridiculous.

“WHOA.” Wally’s eyes got so wide that Clark could practically look through them and _see_ the Amazonian fantasies his brain was concocting. Diana turned and smacked him upside the head. Bruce just grinned.

“I’m going to go get some dancing myself, considering that my boyfriend prefers crimefighting to date night. You guys have fun, and try to pick up some information on G’lorth.” Diana got up and left them alone at the table.

Bruce sighed and put her left foot up on Clark’s knee. Clark froze, and Bruce just sighed again. “Dancing is not good for sprained ankles. And I don’t know how the hell Diana fights crime in shoes like these.”

“That’s fine,” Clark said, while fighting the urge to compare girl-Bruce and Lois in attractiveness.

Bruce rolled her neck around to try and wring out the knots, then fixed those sharp blue eyes on him. “What’s up with you? You’ve been acting weird.”

“Nothing!” Clark snapped, maybe a little too harshly, because Bruce’s gaze narrowed. “Nothing, really. Maybe _turning into a girl_ has changed your perceptions.”

“Maybe,” Bruce conceded, although Clark saw that she didn’t really believe that. He forced a smile and Bruce just watched him while she sipped her wine.

“Guys! Guysguysguysguysguys! ” Flash came careening into the table at twenty miles per hour, nearly knocking Bruce right off her seat (which probably would not have been an occurrence he survived, seeing how high that slit in her dress was), and spilling a bowl of grapes right across floor. He must have been drink a _lot_ with his metabolism to achieve this level of drunkenness. “There’s this alien girl and she say’s that she’s got three sisters and they’re all some sort of hive mind thing so they’re all _one person_ but like _four bodies_ and she saw how fast I moved and asked if I wanted to come back to their room. Can I? Can I please?”

Clark had to run that through in his head three times over before he could make any sense of it. He put his cup down. “Are you asking us permission to go have an…an…intergalactic _fivesome_?”

The drooling puppy expression on Wally’s face well confirmed it.

“Absolutely not.” Bruce said, pulling her foot off Clark (for which he was immensely thankful) so she could sit up straight and hit Wally with the full intensity of a Batglare. “You got me changed into a girl, remember? You don’t get to have an ounce of fun until you figure out how to reverse this. The rest of us _adults_ are trying to catch a pirate. You’ve got your responsibilities.”

“Supes?” Wally pleaded.

Clark shook his head. “Sorry, Wally, I agree. The sooner Bruce gets switched back, the better. And seeing as how it’s your fault he’s um…”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Bruce muttered.

“…anyway,” Clark finished, because there really was no good way to end that sentence, “The point is that you’re the only one who saw this Talanian sorceress, so you’re the only one who can recognize her. Just work on finding her, or at least someone else who can reverse the spell, okay?”

Wally groaned and slunk off to figure out which of the many magic users had been the one in the garden. Clark turned back to Bruce and tried to get off the topic of body swapping. “Speaking of G’lorth and piracy, did you manage to get any information out of your various dance partners? Besides room numbers and thinly-veiled propositions, of course?”

Bruce turned over some of that Batglare to him for the last bit of that comment. “Not much. He’s hiding himself pretty well, sending out information over untraceable electronics or just the rumor mill. There’s some whispers that he’s planning to offload the weapon within the next two days, which would leave him three more days of festivities to occupy everyone while he sneaks away. As for buyers—well, who _wouldn’t_ be interested in a weapon like that? It’s the cosmic version of the atom bomb and relations on this side of the galaxy haven’t been wholly amicable as of late. Any government that could gloss over the ethics of it, which is to say ninety-nine percent of them, has their eye on the sale. The question is who has the finances to outbid the others and also promise G’lorth a reasonable amount of discretion.”

“Damn, he’s being careful.” Clark drank some of the Talanian wine and wished that the weak alcohol would give him anything more than a slight buzz. It was a party, after all, and one of the biggest ones in the universe. He shouldn’t have been this tense. “The most I got was that the Talanians are aware of the rumors, and not at all pleased, but so long as it doesn’t impact the Festival they’ll stay out of it.”

“Still doesn’t rule out the possibility that one of them is facilitating G’lorth’s anonymity. There’s a lot of money behind this sale, and as against this as the Talanians profess to be, I’m sure there’s one or two minor officials who wouldn’t mind a piece of the pie.” Bruce scanned the crowd like she could pick out the pirate’s co-conspirators from sight alone. Whenever someone caught her watching she just flashed a smile and they looked happy enough.

“Sometimes I forget that you can be social.” Clark did his best not to appear amused.

“Make sure the fact that I’ve got kryptonite packed doesn’t slip your mind as well.” Another cold gaze. Clark bit off the suggestion that Bruce bring some of the Wayne-ness that she played for at Gotham high society to the League instead of being a human storm cloud. Bruce got up and smoothed down the dress to cover as much of her as it would allow. “I’m going to snoop around and see what I can find. Otherwise I’m going to tear off the head of whoever asks me to dance next.”

*****&*****

Bruce had broken into three of the more suspicious guests’ rooms so far, and hadn’t found a single clue. Not to mention the fact that the damnable high heels sounded like gunshots on the stone floors, but she didn’t want to lose them in case that was some sort of grand Talanian offense. How on earth Diana managed to be sneaky in the things was beyond her.

Intergalactic pirates with weapons of planetary-scale mass destruction. Thousands of overly friendly aliens. Gender-swapping spells. Wally. She was going to _kill_ Clark well they were back home, just for making her deal with all this.

“Hello, doll.” She jumped—the voice was _way_ too close to her ear. She hadn’t had enough wine to dull her reflexes. Fucking lower body mass. The blue alien was lucky that she had to be civil right now; otherwise he’d be missing whatever part of his body was the Zork equivalent of balls would be missing.

Bruce forced a smile. “Missed me already?”

“You are…” his eyes traveled down her body. She slid into an attack position, just in case he suspected she was out here for more than a breath of air. “…an excellent dancer.”

Great. Just what she needed.

“I’m afraid I’m quite worn out.” She tried to slip past and he leaned across her path, smooth and fluid. Bruce tried to dig up what information had been in their dossier about the Zorks. What she recalled was that the Zorks’ native environment had forced quick evolution, and as a consequence they had a high mating cycle—imprinting on an attractive mate nearly daily.

Doubly great.

She was _not_ going to be a Zorkian sex toy, and so wiped the smile right off her face. “Excuse me. I really have to go.”

Unfortunately, the Zorkian homeworld also had slightly higher-than-earth gravity, which meant that in this environment they had a little bit of superspeed. Before she could so much as get a good hit in, the Zork slipped his hand behind her back and kissed her.

Bruce, naturally, hit him hard enough pulverize his nose. Green blood spurted across her dress. But not before some part of her went _Ah_.

She kicked him in the shin for good measure, hard enough to bruise his tibia. The heels were good for something.

*****&*****

Clark had gone back to their quarters, content that the party was winding down and he could slip away without the Talanians getting uppity about it. Diana and Shayera were already back, having each gone through a number of dance partners nearly equal to Bruce’s. Together, they still didn’t have a single decent lead on G’lorth, and seeing as how Wally wasn’t back yet they probably weren’t going to come up with a helpful Talanian sorceress either.

Frankly, he was ready for bed, and _very_ ready to have a better day tomorrow.

Bruce burst through the door, hair askew and high heels sounding like bullets on the floor. She nearly fell into Clark, tripping over her own two feet. “ _Where is Wally?!_ ”

“Not here.” Clark put his hand on her arm to steady here. She had her jaw set like she wanted to axe-murder someone just to let off some steam. “Everything okay?”

“The blue guy kissed me,” Bruce said, and Clark didn’t know whether to laugh or be concerned. “Now where the fuck is Wally?”

“Back up. The blue guy _kissed_ you? Please tell me you didn’t kill him. Somehow I think the Talanians and their Victorian sense of manners wouldn’t forgive us if you killed him.” Clark eyed the blood splashed across her bodice. Worst Christmas outfit ever—green blood on a red dress. “And why is Wally important right now?”

“Its progressive magic,” Bruce muttered. “God, I hate magic.”

“Progressive magic?”

“It’s getting worse.” She peered out the door, like that would bring Wally scampering.

“What is?” Clark had to admit that this habit of Bruce’s, talking like everyone around could read her mind, was really annoying.

“Being a girl.” She looked at him, entirely serious. “I think its actually turning me into a girl. For real. Which means that I need to figure out how to reverse it. Now.”

“Bruce, explain.”

“He kissed me, and I actually for an instant found him attractive.” Bruce spun around and pointed to her head. “It’s changing my _brain_ , Clark.”

Clark took a step back, not wanting to consider the possibilities. “That would be a problem.”

“And what’s wrong with you, anyway? You’ve been acting bizarre. Keep giving me weird looks.” Bruce was glaring at him now.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Out with it.” She grabbed him by the lapel of his jacket.

“You look like Lois.” It came out before he could stop it.

Bruce’s jaw dropped. It took a lot, Clark knew, to strike Batman mute, but here he’d done it. This was not going to be pretty, once she got her voice back. “ _That’s_ what you’ve been thinking about this entire time? How _hot_ I am? How much you want to _fuck_ me? What the _hell_ , Clark? Seriously, what the hell?”

“I’m sorry!” Clark exclaimed. “I can’t help it! You make a hot girl! I’m a guy, okay?”

“So am I, in case you’ve forgotten!” Bruce was turning red in the face.

Diana stuck her head into the room. “What on earth are you two yelling about?”

“ _I hate men!_ ” Bruce stormed past her and slammed the door to her room. Clark didn’t need superhearing to pick up on the sound of a lamp breaking.

“Well,” Shayera said, walking in to get another of her new favorite fruits, “that certainly escalated quickly. Think he’ll be burning his bra next?” 


	5. The Theatrics of Talanian Society

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this has taken so long to upload--life stuff happened. I'll try to get the entirety of the fic up by the end of the week. In the meantime, enjoy Bruce in a dress.

Things were not much better at breakfast the next morning. Wally hadn’t come back to the room (at least not until after Clark had gone to bed—though he could only imagine where the kid had been) which of course had made Bruce stomp around and grumble some more, all while shooting Clark looks of absolute murder. And now she was threatening to kill him with a grapefruit spoon.

“I just want to sit down,” Clark said; hand still on the chair he’d been about to pull out from the table. 

“You can sit there.” Bruce pointed to the couch a good distance away while still brandishing the grapefruit spoon like a stiletto knife.

“Oh good lord, what do you think I’m going to do to you?” Clark put his bowl of oatmeal (apparently the Talanians believed the only Earth breakfast food was oatmeal) on the table and took the seat across from Bruce. Of course, Bruce glared.

“What’s going on with you two?” Diana asked, taking the seat in between them, always the moderator.

“Nothing,” Bruce snapped. “Where’s Wally?”

On cue, Wally popped in the door. His clothes weren’t quite on the right way, but Clark decided to forgo mentioning it in the hopes that Bruce would forgo killing him. “Hey guys! Sorry I didn’t come back last night. I was…ah…chasing down the sorceress woman.”

“Cut to the chase—did you find her?” Bruce asked. She’d barely touched her oatmeal, and was instead stabbing the gelatinous mass repeatedly with a grapefruit spoon. Why she was even eating oatmeal with a grapefruit spoon, Clark didn’t know, because there were plenty of regular spoons in the kitchenette. Heck, he didn’t even know where Bruce had gotten a grapefruit spoon, seeing as how he had yet to find any sort of Talanian equivalent to a grapefruit. Sometimes he thought that Bruce-in-a-bad-mood just liked to be ornery.

“Sort of,” Wally said, and retreated to a spot that was out of Bruce’s reach.

“What do you mean, sort of?”

Wally coughed just to delay having to talk. “So, I found out who she is! That’s the good part. The bad part is that she’s kind of gone. Apparently she left two days ago on some sort of Talanian meditation-zen-spiritual-retreat thing to the edge of the galaxy, and won’t be back for another ten years. And this spell can only be reversed by the person who put it on.”

Clark put his arm out to stop Bruce from jumping Wally.

But Bruce didn’t immediately go the murder route. Instead she just put down her spoon with the decisiveness of a judge’s gravel and stared at Wally. “So what’s the other way out of this?”

Wally coughed again, like he was choking this time. “I haven’t found one yet.”

“You. Haven’t. _Found._ One?” Bruce’s hand tightened around the spoon so much that her fingers started turning red. “You’ve gotten me stuck like this?”

“Now let’s not get too down on being a woman,” Shayera muttered, while eating her own colorless bowl of oatmeal. Diana nodded in agreement. “God only knows what the world would come to if it was made all of men.”

“No kids,” Wally cut in. “Hey, Bat-babies. Betcha didn’t think of that, Bats. There could totally be Bat-babies.”

“ _Wally!_ ” Clark and Diana shouted in unison and both reached out to restrain Bruce. Which turned out to be entirely unnecessary, since she moaned and clunked her head on the table.

“Oh my god,” she murmured into the hardwood, in the tone of a person who has lost all hope. She stared up at Wally with eyes utterly full of desperation. “I’m stuck like this forever?”

“Why don’t you and I go somewhere else for awhile, Wally? Like, maybe make sure you didn’t miss anything?” Shayera grabbed his arm and dragged him out into the hallway. Bruce put her head back down on the table.

“I’m giving you some leniency because of your situation, darling, but you might want to stop acting like being a girl is a death sentence,” Diana said.

“When we get back to Earth, I’m going to have to pretend I somehow found a sex change that made me a foot shorter or I’m my own long-lost sister and call myself Bria or Bidget or Brenna or some other horribly girly thing.” Bruce raised her head up the table just enough for them to understand what she was saying. “I’m going to have to wear _dresses_ on a regular basis!”

“Um,” GL said, scooting towards the door, “I think I’m going to go help Shayera and Wally. Bye.”

“Let’s try not to get hysterical.” Clark moved back from the table, in case Bruce tried to beat him with a frying pan or something. “I’m sure Wally just didn’t dig deep enough or something like that. C’mon, how ridiculous would it be to have a magic system where spells can only be taken off by the people who put them on? It’d be horribly inefficient and bound to mistakes like this.”

“So you mean like every fairytale or myth ever,” Diana said, quite unhelpfully.

Bruce took a long, deep breath and straightened up in her chair. “No, he’s right. There’s got to be another option. Wally’s just a kid, he probably just didn’t look hard enough.”

“He’s twenty-three.” Clark finished off the last of his oatmeal, because if they were going to be interrogating sorcerers all day, then this might be his last chance to eat. “I think it’s going to be a bit harder than you’re hoping.”

“He’s _twenty-three_? But I can remember when he was running around as Kid Flash with Dick and the rest of the Teen Titans.” The look of desperation washed back over Bruce’s face. “Christ—I’m female _and_ old.”

Clark looked at Diana. “Is this what they mean by ‘the hormones talking’?”

“Don’t you start.” She got up from the table to wash her bowl. “Maybe if we all had to switch up genders once in awhile it would be a good thing.”

“I just love being a peace convention,” Bruce said.

“I just love it that the only thing to un-depress you is sarcasm,” Diana replied.

“Maybe I should leave,” Clark said, and stood.

“Then take him with you.” Diana dumped the last of the water out of her now-clean bowl and put it upside-down on a towel to dry. “I’ll work on the G’lorth case right now, with John’s help, and you two can figure out another way to reverse this thing since obviously that is not a distraction either of you is able to overcome."

*****#*****

They had tried talking to four different sorcerers (three Talanians and one who was orange with horns, the latter just for a different perspective) and had gotten the same answer from all of them. Bruce was looking less and less together with each subsequent answer. 

“Look,” Clark said, after Bruce put her foot through a not-too-expensive-looking Talanian vase, “I didn’t mean to…well, make things weird with what I said. You caught me off-guard, that’s all.”

“I’m sure Lois will love to know how we look alike,” Bruce grumbled, and eyed another innocent vase. “Does every woman with short black hair remind you of your reporter girlfriend? Or just the ones who you’ve known for a decade, as guys? Or just the ones _who actually dated said girlfriend before you_?”

“That’s not fair.”

“It wasn’t fair to tell me I looked like your fuckbuddy.”

“Don’t call Lois that,” Clark snapped. “She’s my _girlfriend_ and no matter what weird spell Wally’s hit you with, you don’t get to disrespect her.”

“Oh, boy. How do any women ever get on without your refreshing down-home chivalry to defend their honor?” Bruce crushed the shards of the vase underneath her boot. She’d gotten quite adept at utilizing the high heels. “Let’s bring out the dueling pistols. Forty paces, right?”

“Could you _stop_?” The last of Clark’s patience vanished with the crunch of porcelain under Bruce’s heel. “I get that this is not comfortable for you, but you don’t have to be such an almighty bitch about it.”

“And quick to hypocrisy, too.” Bruce raised an eyebrow at him.

“You’re not a girl, as you’re so fond of point out when it’s advantageous for you to do so.” Clark had to stop himself from pulling his own hair out. “You’re my psycho friend who has _temporarily_ gotten some anatomy swapped about. So I’m allowed to tell it like it is.”

Bruce grumbled to herself for a minute but didn’t argue. They continued down the hall. Supposedly this was where one of the best of the Talanian sorcerers was going to be, and the consensus among the people they’d asked was that if he couldn’t reverse it, nobody could. Clark hoped, for all their sakes, that that was a metaphorical statement.

“What if it isn’t temporary?” She asked, so much later that it took Clark a minute to recall the topic of conversation.

“It’d better be, both for you _and_ me.” Clark tried to imagine a forever-female Bruce and his brain balked at the ridiculousness of the notion. “And Alfred, because I’d hate to think of him putting in the work to make you a whole new set of costumes. The man does enough. But Bruce—don’t tell me you’re giving up already.”

“I’ve never been an optimist.” She studied the room numbers with an almost predatory glean. “And when you’ve asked everyone from centuries-old sorceresses to non-carbon-based life forms, one does start to feel a bit gloomy about the state of matters.”

“Well if the aliens can’t figure it out, then there’s always Zatanna and Etrigan back home. You’d have to wait a little longer, but I can’t imagine there’s a magical dilemma out there that they’d be unable to solve.” Clark’s eyes bit upon the most ornate door in the hall, carved with gold-gilded runes and painted scarlet. “Looks like we’re here.”

He knocked on the door, and it swung open at the third touch. The interior of the room was thick with white smoke and smelled sweet-spicy, like curry and ginger. The carpeting was softer than that in the hall, and Clark glided forward so easily that he wondered if the smoke might contain a touch of hallucinogenics.  Bruce followed him inside, and the door closed behind them without the work of any discernible mechanics.

In the center of the room sat an ancient Talanian, his red skin dusky and burgundy with age, his hair streaked white and grey. His eyes were milky, and he sat above a pot that crackled and spat sparks, although such a little pot hardly seemed like the likely source of so much smoke. He waved his long-nailed fingers over the pot, catching wisps of smoke. In-between blinks, Clark thought he saw the smoke curl into the figures of flowers and tigers and six-legged horses.

“Welcome.” The sorcerer had a voice that could have carried across an avalanche. “I have been foretold of your arrival.”

“Oh, fuck,” Bruce said, much too loudly to be politely dismissed. “You’re one of _those_.”


	6. The Comparative Aesthetics of Ball Gowns

The Talanian high sorcerer didn’t react to Bruce’s outburst in any way except to raise one grossly long, white eyebrow. Clark tried to stop Bruce from getting dangerously close to the elderly alien, and failed because he couldn’t quite tell where things were with all the smoke.

“Look,” Bruce said, nearly close enough to choke the guy. “I don’t want any of these fucking theatrics. No riddles or cryptic statements or ancient treasure maps.  No blood rituals or ‘finding my inner self’ or any of that shit. I just want to know, in plain English, how to get rid of this spell. Got it?”

“Clearly,” the sorcerer replied, with such a tangible note of disdain that Clark had to stifle a chuckle. “Anything for the _champion_.”

Bruce growled something about magic being the scourge of every world with a sun, but quietly enough that only Clark caught it. The sorcerer waved his hands over the pot, twisting smoke up between his hands. The scent of the air changed from curry to apples, almost sickly sweet.

“Ah,” the sorcerer said. “Yes, I see. Quite the mistake, this, but then I suppose that Alizandra never was one to check for specifications. Fiery girl, her, good sorceress with good magic but— _ah_ —a bit hasty in it. Yes, I certainly see the problem.”

“Good,” Bruce replied. “Now if you wouldn’t mind _fixing_ it.”

“Only the sorcerer who produces the spell can remove it.” The old man clapped his hands together but they made no sound, and the fire spit up from under the pot. Bruce started to protest, took a step forward, but the sorcerer raised a finger to stop her. “Most of the time, that is. Most of the time. But we’re about to approach an equinox point, and so in two days’ time a threshold will open in the main hall. This threshold is a vacuum of magic. A cleansing place. Anyone who steps through will be stripped of any spells or curses placed upon them.”

“So all he has to do is step through?” Clark asked.

“Yes. Mostly.”

“Always a catch when it comes to magic,” Bruce said.

The sorcerer sighed something about _impertinence_ and the smoke in the room darkened. His long, thin mustache twitched with displeasure. Clark thought his expression might be a touch akin to the one that Alfred wore whenever he was losing patience with Master Bruce’s obsessions. “The threshold will be open for only the briefest of moments—fifteen of your minutes at most. If you fail to go through in that space, then there won’t be another chance. The spell will complete the transformation long before the threshold opens again.”

“Great, so right in the middle of the same day I’m supposed to be catching an intergalactic pirate, I have to go hop onto a magical whozit portal.” Bruce crossed her arms and leaned against the door. “Just my luck, I suppose.”

“Gratitude is usually the path taken in these circumstances,” the sorcerer said, “but since that hardly seems likely, you best be on your way.”

“Well,” Clark noted, once they were on their way back to their quarters. “at least we found some way to reverse the spell. I suppose reminding you to be a little nicer is a lost cause at this point. Hopefully the others have information about G’lorth, at least.”

“Hmph,” Bruce sniffed, which sounded almost dignified when done girly.

****#****

They got back to the quarters right around the same time that Diana and Shayera did, with GL and Flash not far behind. There was another _long_ night of Talanian ritual ahead of them, this one an elaborate play followed by a waltz celebrating some battle or another. This meant, of course, that they had to get dressed up again and endure the Talanians’ endless rituals and annoying diplomats. But it _would_ be the perfect cover for G’lorth to meet his buyer.

“The talk is that the deal is going down during the play’s third act,” Diana said. “Now we can’t stop it, because then we’ll never find the weapon. But we can at least figure out who’s buying, and who the Talanian go-between is.”

“G’lorth’s disguised himself as a support member of one of the humanoid embassies. Which one, we still don’t know. They’re probably innocent, though. Took him on as a secretary or something, none the wiser,” Shayera added, while stripping small fruits of their skins with her fingernails. “We’d better be getting ready.”

GL appeared in the hall that lead to the bedrooms. “Speaking of that,” he said, “what the hell is wrong with Bruce?”

“What?”  Clark and Diana got up from the table and went into Bruce’s room, with the others in close pursuit. Clothes were strewn across the bed, mostly the gowns that the Talanians had provided. Pink, blue, red, gold—ruffles and ribbons covered the bed, the chair, and the floor.

Bruce was standing in front of the mirror, on her tiptoes, holding a particularly bright, frilly, and poofy gown across her chest. She did a little spin, and stopped in front of Clark and Diana. She was wearing a big, happy grin that was frighteningly out of place. “Isn’t this _pretty_? I’m going to wear it tonight. Or maybe the sparkly red one—I like sparkles! There’s so many to choose from.” 

“Um.” It took Clark a full minute to reconcile this imagine in his brain. “Bruce, are you feeling okay?”

“Of course I am! We’re going to a party and I get to wear a pretty dress!” Bruce flopped onto the bed and continued to smile that dopey smile up at them.”

“What’s fifteen times seventeen?” Clark asked.

“Math? I’m not good at _math_.” Bruce turned over onto her stomach and wrinkled her nose. “Math is _hard_.”

“Great Hera.” Diana turned on her heel, grabbed Flash, and slammed him up against the wall. Wally gulped, but she didn’t let up. “I swear to all the gods and goddesses listening—if you have turned my boyfriend into a bimbo I will rend your head from your shoulders.”

Bruce jumped up, completely unconcerned, and picked another dress off the bed. “Maybe this one. This one has sequins _and_ ribbons.” 

Clark took her by both shoulders and shook her. “Bruce! Snap out of it! Diana is about to murder Wally and you’re acting like you’ve got bubbles for brains.”

Bruce blinked and her expression changed, from dim-witted happy to confused, and then her eyes got wide and she threw the dress across the room and almost fell back against the wall. “Did I really _say_ that? Oh my god, did I really _think_ that?”

“The spell’s getting worse.” Clark let her go.

“No shit, Sherlock, I think we can all tell that the spell’s getting worse.” Bruce went into the bathroom and splashed fistfuls of freezing water on her face, washing away mascara.

“How are you going to hunt for G’lorth if you’re prancing around in fancy shoes gibbering about your lipstick?” Shayera asked, leaning against the doorframe. “Frankly, I don’t really want to see Little Miss Bats with sharp weapons.”

Bruce slung her utility belt over her shoulder and curled her hand around it protectively. “I can catch pirates perfectly fine, thank you very much. This isn’t any of your goddamn concern.”

“It is if you’re supposed to have my back."

“You want to test my fighting skills?” Bruce pulled a batarang out of her belt and dropped into fighting position. “C’mon. Let’s go. I’ll wager you fifty bucks that I can put you down in twenty minutes.”

“Can we all stop trying to kill each other?” GL asked. “I realize that these are strange circumstances, but we do have to have some men left to get G’lorth. Which won’t happen if you all start murdering one another.”

Bruce glared at Shayera but straightened up and only secured the belt across herself like a sash. “Fine. If I go all crazy again, I give you permission to knock me out. That good enough for you?”

“Quite,” Shayera said, and petted her mace. “Now the ball is almost starting, so you’d better pick out one of your pretty dresses, Cinderella.”

“He looks more like Snow White.” Flash, again, forgot to think before speaking, but when he saw the expression on Bruce’s face he ducked behind Clark.

Bruce yanked him out and twisted his arm behind his back. “You had better be damn hopeful that this whole threshold thing goes off without a hitch.”

 


	7. Space Pirates and Their Moons

~Chapter Seven~

Bruce was reading the specs of the shipment of micro-particle accelerators that G’lorth had made off with, and she did not like what she was finding. Green Lantern had been understating the danger. Each accelerator was the size of a man’s forearm, and was essentially a rail gun on crack. A marble-sized piece of stone (or concrete or glass or an enemy soldier’s body) was loaded into the gun and accelerated to half the speed of light. The energy stored in the bullet could boil a lake or crumble a fortress. If you put one on a ship and took it a far enough distance from the target, it could potentially knock a small moon out of orbit, or cause a tectonic plate shift.

Used by a smart enough person, it would be a planet-killer. An atomic bomb for war on an intergalactic scale. 

“You shouldn’t ruminate at a party.” Clark leaned over to whisper at her. “Especially when you’ve got a line of admirers as long as the Watchtower is tall.”

Bruce glanced backward at the clump of men and several women all huddled around in an attempt to get a dance, and promptly went back to the touchpad she was reading off of. “Is winning a stupid fake battle thing really that appealing? It may just be me, but I’ve never found a sweaty, dirty, bleeding woman to be at her most attractive. 

“You’re just on a roll, aren’t you?” Diana asked, and downed what must have been her third or fourth goblet of mead. “Half the time you see me I’m sweaty, dirty, and bloody. That’s our _job_.”

“And I thought I had a thankless relationship.” Shayera’s interjection earned her a glare from both of them.

“Word is that G’lorth’s demonstration of the weapon is supposed to happen any time now.” Wally popped into the seat on the other side of Clark, with what appeared to be half of a steak shoved in his mouth. “Hopefully he’s not planning to blow up, like, a person.”

“Yes, Wally, avoiding murder would be preferable,” Bruce said, but Wally was too engrossed in the alien buffet to care much about the razor-sharp edge to her voice. So Bruce just sighed and went back to avoiding her suitors, or she was about to when the entire Talanian complex shook like a level-5 earthquake and she was thrown out of her chair on to the floor. 

Aliens, both humanoid and non, ran screaming to the edges of the room as hardwood tables came crashing to the floor and glasses shattered against the walls. The flagstones buckled and snapped. 

Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

“Don’t tell me we’ve got another problem on our hands,” GL said, standing up to wipe spilt wine off his shirt. “What was that?”

One of the Talanians, a teenage girl, pointed up to the grand skylight above the hall. Her eyes were wide enough to be more white than color. “ _The moon_!”

“That,” Bruce said grimly, “was G’lorth’s demonstration.”

The moon of Talan lay shattered, the rough sphere broken into a crescent and an asteroid, split down the side like a broken heart. It had spun around the planet for millennia, and would have for many more, if not for one egomaniac pirate and his apocalypse machines.

“Damn,” Wally said, rubbing his hair. “Those sure are some guns, huh?”

“Hence us trying to stop him.” Bruce resisted the urge to clock the kid. “Anyone see him around? Or another guest who looks particularly interested yet unsurprised by what just happened?”

“Over there.” Diana pointed at a gaggle of blue-skinned aliens—the Zorkians, oh how Bruce would _love_ to get even with their horny little race—and another group of small, brown people who looked rather like the Hobbits out of a Tolkien novel. Both were sipping bubbly wine and staring at the moon like it was an amusing fireworks show rather than a celestial body cracked in half. “And look, in the sky. Isn’t that one of the Zorkian ships, pretending to be dead in space? That’s probably where G’lorth and one of his accelerators are. He wouldn’t let a customer try it on their own; he’d want to be up there too.”

Clark nodded. “Much too valuable to risk a buyer making off with one." 

“All right, we know who the buyers are. Now sit back down so they don’t think we suspect them.” Diana took her seat at the table again, just as the Talanian ambassadors did. The play going on at the front of the hall had continued throughout the commotion, the actors so well-trained that the had hit the climax of their plot in the middle of the devastation. Now the curtains fell, to scattered applause.

Bruce was still frozen on her feet, staring off into space.

“Hey.” Clark poked her gently. “You awake? Bruce?”

“Bruce?” she asked, eyes wide and about as intelligent as Bambi’s idiot brother. “I’m not Bruce. I’m Brenda. Like Brenda Starr.”

“Does this mean I get to knock him out?” Shayera asked, reaching for her mace, at the same time as Wally said, “Bats has a _girl_ name now?”

Shayera reached for her weapon, but Bruce’s face went blank suddenly and she shook her head like she was trying to get something loose. “Don’t hit me. I snapped out of it.”

“Damn,” Shayera said sadly, as she had not yet had the opportunity to punch anyone on this expedition, and got up to find something semi-edible on the refreshments table.

“You read _Brenda Starr_?” Clark asked, after she’d gone. Bruce shrugged over a plateful of tiny chocolate things.

“I read the paper at breakfast. Including the comics.”

Clark considered this. “That’s abnormally normal for your. What a weird image.”

“I just can’t win with you people.” Bruce poured herself another glass of wine—a very, very tall glass. “Half the time you’re telling me how odd I act, but when I actually do humanlike things you say it’s bizarre.”

“Did you just call yourself human _like_?” Clark asked.

Bruce threw her hands up in frustration. “I read the sports section too, and I don’t give a damn about sports. But if I didn’t read all of the paper it wouldn’t last the whole way through breakfast.”

“How come I’m the alien and I care more about football than you do?”

“Because you’re a Kansas hick and your entire culture is made up of football and county fairs.” Bruce stretched in her chair, watching the others around the room. “When are G’lorth and his Talanian stooge going to show their faces? I’m glad to have something other than tentacles or oatmeal to eat, but I don’t want to have to dance again."

Clark pointed at a floating blob of blue energy, which was waving its flanges suggestively at Bruce. “That Yxkylian girl sure seems to like you. The blue Yxkylians are the girls, right? The green ones are guys?”

“Yes.” Bruce gave him a long, long look over her plateful of chocolate (which was all she had eaten since breakfast. Clark suspected she was taking the chance to enjoy junk food now that her body was going to be magically reverted to prime condition). “Although both those terms are relative.”

Clark watched her push her food around glumly for a few more minutes before trying the tack that Bruce usually responded worst to: sentimentality. “You know we’re going to fix this. And heck—all you have to do is walk through a portal. We’ve been to literal Hell before, and fought a full-scale planetary invasion off _twice_. This is nothing.”

Bruce let out a stream of air through her nose. “And what if it isn’t? What happens if I’m stuck as a—a mindless _bimbo_ , as Diana put it, for the rest of my life? Everything I am—my whole life—just wiped clear away.”

“That’s not going to happen. Just like you’re not going to go dance with that blue gas sack over there.”

Bruce laid down her napkin next to her plate, like she’d entirely lost her appetite. Come to think of it, Clark hadn’t actually seen her eat more than a few bites off the various plates of food she’d had. “I can feel the real me slipping away. This is dying.”

“I recall that you once told me that this life wasn’t for those who feared dying,” Clark said. “Once of the first few times we met, in fact. In quite a self-important and holier-than-thou fashion to boot.”

“I lied.” Bruce smiled, ghostly. “The possibility of being replaced by the Fembot wouldn’t be so bad if her name wasn’t Brenda. I mean, _Brenda_? It sounds like I should be a fifties housewife with a bad puffy hairdo.”

“I’m sure Alfred would love to finally have some help with cooking,” Clark said. “Maybe Brenda will be the first of the Waynes to figure out how to boil pasta without help from a Pennyworth." 

“My mother could cook.”

“Didn’t your mother marry into the family?”

“Oh, shut up.” Bruce kicked him under the table, probably hard enough to bruise if Clark hadn’t been invulnerable. “Seriously though, if something goes wrong—and let’s face it, for us it _always_ does—promise you’ll fucking lobotomize me. Just so I don’t have to be that insipid little estrogen-bag.”

“Only if you promise me that _you_ won’t do something stupid like go after G’lorth during the window where the portal’s open, or jump in front of a ray gun instead of going through or something.” Clark cut off her response. “No, for real. I know you. Don’t worry about space pirates or particle accelerators, and just go through the threshold, okay? We can handle G’lorth.”

“All right,” Bruce agreed, reluctantly. “But you may have just jinxed it.”

 


	8. The Interior Motivations of Speedsters

“It’s just not fair,” Wally said, whilst stabbing his oatmeal with a spoon like he could actually cause it harm. He and Shayera were the only ones up so far—him because he was always too hyperactive to get much sleep, and her because it was kind of hard to fit wings in the Talanians’ tiny idea of a human bed.

“What isn’t?” she asked, through her hangover, already looking forward to her next cup of grog (or mead or whatever a nice scarlet-skinned waiter pressed into her hand). 

“Bats.” Wally drove his spoon down hard enough for the bowl to shudder. “How come he gets to be both Mr. Tall, Dark, and Mysterious _and_ a super hot chick? Is it not enough to have all the Justice League ladies drooling over him, now he has to have a whole intergalactic harem of male admirers too? If the spell had turned him into a puppy, would he also be the most adorable puppy in the world?” 

“Hey, you did this.” Shayera pointed out—extra pointedly, because he was making her head hurt. “It’s going to be your fault if he gets stuck as ‘Brenda’ and doesn’t get back to all dark n’ scary.”

“Don’t remind me. We have to skip a party to go catch a pirate whose name sounds like a sneeze, but all he has to do is step through a magic doorway.” Wally finally stopped torturing his oatmeal and took a bite. “Though ‘Brenda’ might actually be better than Bats.”

“Really? You don’t mean that.”

Wally met her eyes. “You’d rather have the guy who gets on our case about being five minutes late for monitor duty than the hot, barely-dressed, really stupid chick?”

“You may have a point. But if Bruce doesn’t get changed back, I doubt Nightwing is going to want to play videogames with you every Friday. Heck, he’ll probably be too busy taking care of Gotham. And Alfred certainly won’t be baking you pans of chocolate-chocolate-pecan cookies.” Shayera watched him sigh and nod. “I don’t think you’re really angry at Bruce. I think you’re jealous of him.”

“I’m not jealous.” Wally crossed his arms over himself. “I don’t want to be a perpetually unhappy Dark Avenger type.”

Shayera snorted. “But you _have_ had a major crush on Diana for _years_. All of that ‘Princess’ talk, bringing her iced mochas every ten minutes, volunteering over and over and over to show her around ‘Man’s World’…and then _he_ gets her. Without breaking the perpetually grumpy routine. Always the kid hanging out with the adults, right?”

“I just don’t get it!” Wally exploded, hands up in the air, the bowl of oatmeal skittering across the table. Shayera caught it to keep it from spilling across the floor. “I’m nice to her. I treat her well. He breaks up with her every two weeks, goes on about his _mission_ and how he can’t have any _distractions_ , and yet she still wants him. It just doesn’t make sense. And he still refers to me as Kid Flash by accident sometimes.”

“Well, he probably still thinks of Dick as Robin, and you two were in the Titans together,” Shayera said. “Although it’s kinda cute that you were jealous enough to turn him into a girl.”

“I didn’t mean to turn him into a girl.” Wally slumped in his chair like a deflating balloon. “I just wanted to…I don’t know…make him ease up a little. He could certainly afford to.”

“You’re not going to make me go into all the textbook psychological reasons why Bruce will never, ever do that, right?”

Wally sighed deeply. “No. I know. Maybe he could be just a tad less badass, though?”

“Don’t try out leather. I don’t think you could pull it off.” Shayera laughed and reached across to ruffle his hair. She was interrupted by a door slamming somewhere down the hall, and then by Bruce tramping in.

They both got a suspicious look through slit Bat-eyes. “What were you two talking about?”

“Nothing.” Shayera stared back with equal determination. “You’re starting to get paranoid, you know. Eat your oatmeal.”

Bruce just muttered to herself about losing her touch and got a bowl.

****#****

“Don’t you think you might be overreacting just a wee bit?” Clark asked. Though only halfheartedly, because most of the time he didn’t even think Bruce was listening to him during these conversations. They always seemed to go the same way.

“She called me paranoid.” Bruce paused to peer into another empty room. The deal for the particle accelerators was going to go down in less than two hours, and they still had to actually get eyes on G’lorth. “And their body language clearly indicated that they were talking about me.”

Clark looked down another service corridor. Empty, of space pirates and everything else. “Do you even hear yourself?”

“They were acting suspiciously,” Bruce reiterated, and bent down to pick up a tiny shred of blue cloth that Clark had missed—the same blue as on G’lorth’s flightsuit.

“No offense, but you _do_ have high heels on right now,” Clark said. “The whole thing is bound to be a topic of conversation.”

Bruce _hrumph_ ed and started down a dim corridor. “It looks like he’s holed up down here.”

Clark followed her in. The slim hallway appeared to be an extra storage area—it was lined with shelves and crates of spare cutlery and linens—but the layer of dust would suggest that it was more End of the World rations than everyday use items. At the break of the dead-end corridor, they found a blanket and an empty black case. 

“He’s been here,” Bruce said, kneeling down to examine the evidence.

“Not for awhile. I can smell the radiation from the accelerators, and it’s faint here. He’s been gone for at least a day.”

“Goddamnit, we need a way to get a tracker on him, and he obviously isn’t coming back here before the deal.” Bruce poked at the blanket and case, looking for clues, but Clark could see from the way her mouth went hard and flat that G’lorth was good at covering his tracks. She shifted to take the weight off her sprained ankle, so small a motion that he almost missed it. Bruce was so good at hiding injuries that sometimes Clark outright forgot about them.

“How’s the ankle?” he asked, out of both politeness and concern. 

“I’m fine. Just sore,” Bruce put enough of an edge on it to show that it was annoying her more than anything.

Clark offered her a hand up and she took it, but when she was halfway to her feet something in her eyes changed. And Clark just _knew_ that Bruce had left the building. “Hey. Still here?” 

A slow smile spread across her face, and Clark shivered. This couldn’t be good.

Bruce’s arms curled around his neck and then her face was dangerously close to his. She leaned over and whispered into his ear, “Now that we’re alone in this _awfully_ empty hallway, maybe we can actually get something good done.”

“Bruce?” Clark asked, trapped between her and the wall. “I mean—ah—Brenda? What are you doing?”

She put on a little pouty face. “You don’t like me?”

“I— _what_?” 

Brenda (he _so_ did not want to think of her as Bruce right now, oh he most certainly did not) licked her lips and pressed her body up against him. The wall was to his back, shelves to both sides, and the ceiling a mere foot over his head. He had no way to go unless he wanted to shove Bruce into the other side of the hall. “Come on now. You like this. I know it’s not very polite to brag, but I have a _very_ nice body and I can think of so very many uses for it.”

“I love Lois,” Clark said.

She tilted her head to the side. “And I love a man who plays hard to get.”

“No.” He tried to shove her away and she moved around him, because of all the things of Bruce she retained, one of them just _had_ to be his evasive skills. “You are my best friend, who will absolutely kill me for this when he comes back. So you are going to get off. Now.”

She sighed like he was being such a silly, silly boy. “You should see all the kinky things inside this head. Your friend sure has an imagination.”

“Um,” Clark said, because he wasn’t sure what to do with this information. Bruce/Brenda apparently took this as an invitation, because her breath was warm on his neck and her hand was in his hair.

And then, just as suddenly, she stopped.

“Oh god,” Bruce said. “Please don’t tell me I was about to do what I think I was about to do.”

“Can you please get off of me?” Clark said. 

“Sorry.” Bruce pulled away to the opposite side of the hallway. She looked so deeply disturbed that Clark felt a little bad for snapping. “How many more hours until I get to jump through this fucking threshold and go back to normal?”

“Only two. Just try to stay sane until then?” Clark took one last look at G’lorth’s hidey-hole to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. “And I think we’re even now. Although what is this Brenda says about you having kinky stuff in your head?”

“We’ve got a job where we spend half our time tied up in some villainous lair,” Bruce said. “Don’t you ever have passing thoughts about interesting uses for rope?”

“No,” Clark replied, honestly.

“Well I don’t know what they feed you in Kansas to make you all so boring.” Bruce shook her head in mock disdain, tossing her hair. She _was_ cute, when she wasn’t being a sex maniac.

“It’s not like I grew up in _Idaho_. It was Kansas.”

Bruce rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t aware that there was some sort of competition among the flyover states for least-boring.”

“I guess we now know that you were crazy before you put that leather costume on,” Clark noted, and watched Bruce glare.

“Oh, shut up, Kent. I had your girlfriend as a snack.”

“And then she broke up with you.” Clark raised an eyebrow at him. ”So I don’t know how much longer you can really use that against me. Plus, I just can’t take you seriously with that adorable voice.”

Bruce, wasting no time, punched him.

“Ow!”

“ _You’re invulnerable!_ ”

“Nurture over nature?” Clark rubbed his arm. Bruce looked up at the ceiling in silent exasperation, and they went to go find their space pirate. 


	9. Trickster Schemes and Shared Spells

“Just a little over an hour, now,” Diana said, looping her arm lazily around Bruce. They had tracked down G’lorth (he was hiding out in a garden, pretending to be meditating under a blue-leafed tree. In reality he had a gun tucked under his fake-religious robes) and so had very little to do for the next forty minutes. “Bet you can’t wait to be back to normal.”

“Forty minutes is forever,” Bruce agreed, and let her get close. They were on stakeout, waiting in an alcove of the hallway outside the garden. Diana tried to kiss her, and she flinched.

Diana tried not to look hurt. “What?”

Bruce avoided her eyes. “I…have a confession to make.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Diana pulled away and tucked her legs under herself, listening from the other side of the ledge they were sitting on.

“I…” Bruce started, stopped, and took a breath as deep as if she’d just run a marathon. “Well, not really me. But me. You know—Brenda…she kind of tried to kiss Clark.”

Diana stared at him, and then she rubbed at her mouth in a way that hid from Bruce exactly what she was feeling. “You…as Brenda…tried to kiss Clark? Is that right?”

“Yes,” Bruce said, regretfully.

Diana made a sound like she was choking, then snorted, and finally burst into laughter so bone-shaking that she fell right off the ledge. She sat on the floor, tears in her eyes, giggling like a six-year-old on too much sugar. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not funny to you. But Hera, that _image_.”

“I was trying to be honest with you,” Bruce protested.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Diana said, stifling another burst of laughter. “I appreciate that. I do. But you have to admit, the idea of you and Clark...”

Bruce sighed. “I’m sure it’ll be funny once I’m back to the correct anatomy. But thank you for taking all of this well, at least.”

“This is an interesting change of pace.” Diana gestured up and down at Bruce’s physique. “And as I told Wally, I’m an Amazon, not an evangelical preacher’s daughter.”

“Obviously you’ve never heard the sayings about preachers’ daughters,” Bruce said.

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

Diana shook her head at her. “Forty-five more minutes. Don’t lose you mind before then.”

“Guys!” It was Wally, coming in over their comlinks from his and John’s post on the opposite end of the hall. “G’lorth’s on the move. But it’s too soon yet.”

Bruce peered around the corner and saw the pirate moving down the hall at a good clip, definitely much more purposefully than if he was just going to the bathroom or something like that. She and Diana slipped off the ledge and followed him at a distance, shortly joined by Clark. 

“Look,” Clark said. “He has the case. And it’s full. We can take him down now and get the weapons under lock and key. We won’t catch the buyers but we wouldn’t be able to do more than give them a strong talking-to anyway.”

“Sounds good.” Bruce ran over the statistics in her head. “Flash and Green Lantern—come around and trap him on the other side.”

As soon as the word came out of her mouth, a quibble of doubt started up in the back of her skull. This seemed like a straightforward plan, but there was something not quite right here. They had been sneaky, made sure not to tip G’lorth off as to their intentions, but he _had_ to know that the Justice League was in attendance. So why was he carrying all the weapons around with him, when a smart seller would take one along as a sample and give the buyer the location of the others? And why wouldn’t he just stay up in the spaceship where he’d blown up the moon, where it was relatively protected?

Fishy.

“Superman—” she began, finger on her comlink, when Flash and GL rounded the corner. And in an instant, G’lorth whirled around, robes falling to the floor to reveal his light, sleek armor.

“Little slow,” the pirate said, his long canines making his speech lisp. He tossed something out over their heads, little glass spheres with golden calligraphy winding around their middles. “Have fun with this.”

“Those are alchemy symbols,” Diana said, somewhat unhelpfully, right before the spheres shattered on the ground. Blue smoke burst across the hall, so thick that Bruce couldn’t even see her hand a foot from her face. She could hear the others coughing, but didn’t feel more than an oppressive heaviness herself.

“What was that?” gasped a voice that Bruce didn’t recognize. “I feel weird. Supes? GL? Where are you guys?" 

The smoke started clearing, and Bruce saw a figure to the left of her, where Diana had been standing seconds ago. But this certainly wasn’t Diana.

The figure bent down and picked up a shard off of one of the spheres. “This is a spell,” said the deep, booming voice. “It spreads out any active spell in the vicinity onto bystanders. But its temporary—fifteen minutes.”

Bruce realized in an instant what that meant. The spheres made spells in the vicinity spread out to cover everyone nearby. And currently, the only spell was on her.

The last of the smoke fell away and Bruce saw the others picking themselves up. Diana, still looking at the shard of the sphere, was a now a six-and-a-half foot tall man, broad chested and definitely living up to the image of an Olympian. 

“What on earth?” asked Clark, currently a lean, blond-haired woman with startlingly blue eyes. She looked down at herself. “Oh. Spreads out the spell. I see.”

“Clever distraction,” GL noted. She was shorter than Clark; built like a fighter. “He’s gone. Hey, Wally, how come you didn’t change?”

“He did.” Shayera attempted to rein in a snicker. “He’s just a really flat-chested girl.”

“What the hell?” Wally crossed her arms over herself. She did indeed look quite boyish. Maybe she had long hair, but her mask hid it. “This isn’t fair! I don’t even get to be a hot girl? What sort of evil karma is this?”

“Rightful revenge,” Bruce said. 

Clark rolled her eyes at them both. “Come on—we already let him get away! We’ve had a second to get used to this; surely we can spend fifteen minutes swapped around a bit without it screwing us up totally. John and Wally—you guys go north. Shayera and Diana sweep south, and Bruce and I will go west, towards the threshold. He couldn’t have gone east—too many of us to go through.”

They split up, with Wally still muttering about always getting the short end of the stick.

“How come you’re a blonde now, when everyone else kept their same hair color?” Bruce asked, nose wrinkled, while she examined Clark. “Isn’t that weird?”

“I dunno.” Clark ruffled her hair, which was cut at her shoulders in a sleek bob. It made her look even more like the picture of a corn-fed Midwesterner than she did as a guy. “It’s a nice change of pace though. What do you think—is blond a good look on me?”

“You’re only enjoying this because it isn’t possibly permanent for you,” Bruce said. “And no, you look like a dandelion." 

Clark grinned. “You should try and see the bright side. It’s sort of like Halloween.”

“I swear to god, Clark, I will start reciting blond jokes if you don’t turn off the perkiness. Has the spell soaked into your brain already, or are you just like this all the time and I don’t notice because your voice is a lower register?”

Clark poked her. “It’s not like Diana minds.”

“How does a blond brain cell die? Alone.”

“You’re so ornery. We’re headed towards the threshold. You can relax.”

“Why can’t a blonde dial 911? She can’t find the eleven button on the phone.”

Clark sighed. “Why can’t Batman have any fun? Because his face is frozen like that.”

Bruce rubbed her temples. “You are so goddamn—wait, your costume has a fucking _skirt_ now.”

It did indeed, and one rather reminiscent of Supergirl’s—a connection that Bruce did not want to think too deeply on. Clark just sort of shrugged it off. “Yeah. I guess the spell swapped around our costumes too. Maybe it would’ve done the same for you, if you’d actually been wearing anything when it took effect.”

“I was in bed.”

“Most people own pajamas.”

“For the amount of time I spend sleeping, pajamas seem like a poor investment.”

Clark paused in the hall to give him a long, long, long look. “I think if we’re trying to decide which of us is currently the strangest, you most certainly get the trophy.”

Bruce just silently thanked her lucky stars that he only had another half-hour before she got to change back to normal. And then maybe this whole damn trip could end, and she could take a rather large dose of morphine and erase it from her memory.

 


	10. The Best Laid Plans of Bats and Men

“Intergalatic space pirates, a cosmic peace conference-slash-Renaissance-Faire, a blown-up moon, and now we’ve all gotten hit with a spell that swaps around genders.” Shayera looked down at himself, and while he was not displeased with his quite warrior-esque physique, he now understood why Bruce kept attempting to murder Wally. “This certainly has been quite a week.”

“Agreed.” Diana sighed. He seemed to be more uncomfortable with the whole thing than Shayera was, mainly because (as Shayera suspected, at least) he looked scarily close to a non-god Hercules, with his long dark hair and trimmed beard. “How long are we stuck like this? Bare-chestedness is seriously impractical. I don’t know how the Olympians stand it.”

Shayera snorted at that. “Fifteen more minutes, Princess. Then you’ll get your oh-so-modest costume back. Honestly. At least _I_ have pants.”

“And my body was sculpted by Aphrodite herself,” Diana shot back, before cutting himself off. “Hera. I think I owe Bruce an apology. This is stressful.”

“Speaking of your silent boyfriend, what are you going to do if this whole threshold deal doesn’t work out?” Shayera poked around down one of the halls. No signs of any runaway space pirates, nor had their been for the last half-mile of hallway, either. This place was _endless_ , but at least it seemed that their section of it was absent of G’lorth.

“I don’t know. That…thing inside his head is creepier than Hades. And I can’t imagine bringing ‘Brenda’ back to Alfred and the boys.” Diana peered into a dim alcove and sighed in defeat. “But it is going to work. All he has to do is walk through a magical portal. I’m sure Bruce can manage that.”

“Of course. This is only Batman we’re talking about. It’s not like he’s ever prone to making things unnecessarily dramatic or complicated,” Shayera said. “Like waiting until literally the last possible second to save us all from an alien invasion, prior to which he had faked his own death.”

“That was _J’onn’s_ plan,” Diana pointed out, with more than a little annoyance. “And it was also years ago. Although I do recall him having to crash the Watchtower to stop a separate invasion that you put in motion.”

Shayera muttered something under his breath, but really had no response to that.

****#****

“How does he _do_ it?” Wally asked, for what was undoubtedly the millionth time in the past ten minutes. “I mean it. I want to know how.”

“Are you seriously still whining about not being a hot enough girl?” John elbowed him. “Shayera told me about your little breakdown this morning. Trust me, you don’t want to be Bruce.”

“I don’t want to be him at all. But the guy gets turned into a girl—which yeah, sounds awful when it has the possibility of being permanent, and no, I didn’t mean it—and he still gets the _best possible_ girl scenario. Meanwhile, I look like a ten-year-old.”

“As you’ve reiterated several times.” They were in one of the Talanian gardens—and these gardens were acre-wide, decadent affairs. Plenty of hedge mazes, big trees, and bushes full of flowers for G’lorth to hide behind.

Wally grumbled. “Didn’t you and Shayera break up? What’s with her telling you things I say?”

“We can still be friends. That’s what we adults do,” John said it with the sort of smile that implied this situation was more complicated than just being friends. Wally nearly brought up the fact that John was ostensibly dating Vixen, but decided that that might be just a step too far.

She settled on a simple “Oh, screw you” instead.

John chuckled while she checked behind a bush of indeterminate variety. “I don’t see any signs of space piracy here. You?”

“No, and I’ve already dashed around the place twice. G’lorth’s good at this whole hiding business. And we only have ten more minutes to find him.”

****#****

Clark gave Bruce a little shove in the direction of the threshold. “Come on. You’ve only got a little while left. Go get swapped back to normal.”

“We still haven’t found G’lorth. That’s priority one. He can’t have gotten too far unless he’s got a teleporter with him, but I’m fairly certain he doesn’t. I’m just going to stick around long enough to get my hands around his scrawny neck.” Bruce finished searching around yet another set of empty bedrooms and kicked at the wall in frustration. Her temper was dancing with its last bit of restraint. “We’ve just got to find him first.”

“ _Go!_ ” Clark exclaimed, in equal amounts of annoyance. She could feel the spell on herself wearing off—the female form was going to fade away soon. “Come on! Do you want to be stuck as crazy girly-girl Brenda for the rest of your life?”

Bruce hissed through her teeth. “Fine. But please, do your best to stop the money-hungry alien with the weapons of mass destruction, yeah?”

Clark nodded, and Bruce started off down the hall towards the place where the sorcerer had told her the threshold would be. It was a garden, smaller than the ones that they’d been shown on all of the official tours. It looked more like a shrine, actually, with lots of arcane symbols carved into the walls. Her comlink didn’t seem to be working anymore—yet another thing that magic screwed up.

The threshold was only a hundred feet away, glittering a fragile, incandescent blue. Bruce almost went towards it, and then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the swish of a dark robe vanish down a service corridor.

G’lorth. Going the opposite direction of Clark and the others. And Bruce had no way to call them and tell them where he was going.

Crap.

Bruce took one last look at the threshold, sighed because this sort of thing was _bound_ to happen, and took off after G’lorth.

The pirate was fast on his muscled reptilian legs. So fast that he was leading Bruce further and further away from the threshold and using up the few moments it would be open. Bruce pushed herself harder, felt the strain of going from a lazy walk to all-out wind sprints like a knife in her side, and her fingertips brushed against the back of his cloak.

One last leap, and she was on top on him, pinning him to the ground, wrestling the case away from him, and trying to avoid his teeth. She took a swipe of sharp claws across her cheek, and tasted blood on her lip, and paid him back for it with a vicious right hook that left him dazed on the stone floor.

“Hey!”

Bruce turned around to find Clark, Diana, and all the rest of them running up. “Took you long enough. He tricked us, or tried to—doubled back and went off down a service corridor. Nearly had us.”

Clark had an expression halfway between relief and horror. Bruce noted with more than a tinge of bitterness that they were all back to normal. “What about the threshold? How much time do you have left.”

Bruce tossed the case up to him and checked her watch. “Around six seconds. Five.”

“Five seconds?” Wally asked, with the sort of cross-eyed look that Bruce had come to associate with very bad ideas. “I bet I could make it.”

He grabbed Bruce by the arm and flew off towards the threshold, so fast that the gust of air he left almost knocked Diana off her feet.

 

 


	11. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the final chapter! Thanks for reading.

“Bats,” Wally said, with no small amount of pride, “I totally deserve a ‘thank you’ for that.”

“Like hell you do,” Bruce replied, still holding an ice pack to the back of his head (although he was, thank the gods, in the Javelin on his way away from this horrid, horrid planet). “You _threw_ me into a _stone wall_ and gave me a _concussion_.”

“Hey—I thought you were going to go in the threshold and do something mystical like float or spin around or something. How was I supposed to know that girl-you would go in one side and boy-you would come straight out the other?” Wally shrugged and hopped into the seat across the aisle from Bruce. “Aren’t you glad you’re not _Brenda_ anymore?”

Bruce sighed through his teeth. “Just in case you don’t remember from all the times we’ve reiterated this, it was your fault in the first place." 

Shayera stood up and leaned over their two seats. “Hey guys, we’re going to have a nice, quiet ride home, right? I don’t have to remind either of you that I have a mace?" 

“Thank you,” Clark said, from up front.

“I figure someone has to give you a break from playing moderator,” she replied, and settled back into her seat next to John.

“You know,” Bruce said to Wally, more quietly and after a sufficient break, “being jealous doesn’t mean you have to go playing with alien magic. That never ends well.”

“Hey!” Wally turned and shot a glare at Shayera.

“I didn’t tell him anything!” she protested.

Bruce shook his head. “Detective, remember? Not that you’ve got even the slightest sense of sneakiness. Really, how many times do you think the whole ‘Let me explain Man’s World to you, Princess’ schtick is going to work?”

Wally, at least, had the good sense to look abashed.

Bruce considered another sarcastic remark, but gave up on it and decided to throw the kid a bone. “You should consider calling that reporter chick who’s always trailing you around. She seems like your type.”

“Really?” Wally visibly brightened. “Linda? You think she’d be into me?”

“Sure,” Bruce said. “She seems plenty admiring on the news. And she’s never met _me_.”

Wally scowled. “Bats, you really are a jackass sometimes.”

“Testing your luck?” Bruce asked.

“That’s how you know he likes you,” Clark interjected, to Wally, without even bothering to turn around in his seat or address Bruce. “You should hear the things he says to me about Lois.”

“We _were_ almost engaged,” Bruce said.

“Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” Clark replied, still the book he’d brought for the ride home. “And anyway, I kept her, as I tell you every time we have this conversation.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Wally held up both hands. “Bats dated Lois? When? Why have I never heard of this?”

“It was before he and I met,” Clark said. “Well, before Superman and Batman met, at least. And, as I would like to emphasize, it did not last long.”

“I recall you threw me into a wall,” Bruce muttered, and gingerly touched the back of his head again. “Which apparently was the start of a theme.”

“It was a table,” Clark said, “and you proceeded to mock me with kryptonite.”

“I didn’t ‘mock’ you with it, I was merely making a point as to why you should have stopped fighting me and listened. And _you_ used you x-ray vision to see through my cowl.” Bruce pointed a finger of accusation in Clark’s direction. “Total invasion of privacy.”

“It took you all of a day to come up with a lead-lined suit.”

“You’d already done it, Clark!" 

“Nobody kill me or anything,” Wally said, “but the term ‘old married couple’ was totally made for you guys.”

Bruce and Clark turned to him in unison with very, very near-killing looks.

“Ma and Pa don’t fight this much,” Clark said, “and they are the very definition of an old married couple.”

“Comparing us to your parents is not helping.” Bruce had his thumb and index finger pinching the bridge of his nose now. “That would practically be incest.”

“Aw,” Clark said.

Bruce glared—at him, at Wally, and at Shayera for good measure. “We argue too much to be friends.”

Clark, of course, looked a bit hurt. “Slightly less adorable.”

Shayera leaned in, because she hadn’t been able to have a good bar fight on Talan—and what was the point of so much free liquor without a good fight?—and also because something in her enjoyed poking the hornets’ nest. “Hey Clark, I heard you gave Bruce a ring once.”

“ _It was kryptonite_!” Clark and Bruce shouted, in unison, loudly enough to make even Green Lantern (who had been trying, so far, to ignore this whole exchange) look up in irritation.

Bruce had gone from pinching his nose to rubbing his temples with one hand. “Considering that I’ve had a fairly stressful week, maybe we could refrain from the annoying me for just the space of a ride home?”

“You started it this time,” Flash said, but obediently ducked back down into his seat, doubtlessly to fantasize about his future reporter girlfriend. 

“I’m going to need a vacation from this vacation,” Diana said, with a very long sigh. “Next time I want to have a change of pace, remind me to go alone.”

“If you wanted a vacation, you didn’t have to use a space pirate as an excuse,” Bruce said. 

Diana blinked in surprise and tried to hide her shock. “Why Bruce Wayne, are you offering to sweep me off to an island somewhere?”

For an instant, Bruce looked equal parts alarmed and stunned at what he’d let slip, but then he evidently decided that he needed a real vacation as well. “I’m sure Tim and Dick can handle Gotham for a couple more nights.”

Diana settled back into her seat with a happy little smile, careful not to let Bruce see her looking _too_ eager. “Well then. This might turn out to be a good trip after all.”

  


End file.
